Voting “inline”, a faster voting infrastructure, send e-mails using your real e-mail address, and a small number of other changes.

Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Users

Inline Moderation

(This feature by Robert Kaye)

In an effort to reduce the voting backlog, the system now shows you
one vote at a time whenever you’re on an artist, album or track page.
The moderation chosen is, in order of preference: for this artist; for one of
your subscribed artists; for an artist related to this artist; or anything
at random. When you click one of the three voting buttons (yes, no,
abs) then the voting panel reloads to show something else to vote on.
The rest of the page remains unchanged.

Faster Voting Pages

The moderation database tables have been reorganised behind the
scenes. The result of this is thatthe voting pages (in particular)
should be much faster. See “Moderation Table Restructuring” below
for more technical details of what’s actually changed.

Reveal My E-Mail Address

When sending an e-mail to another moderator, it’s now possible
(as long as you’ve told MusicBrainz your e-mail address) to choose
to reveal your e-mail address to the other party. Doing so makes it
much easier for them to reply to you. The default setting is
controlled by a new preference, which in turn
defaults to “off” (i.e. don’t reveal my address).Read the help for more information.

Other Changes

When searching for moderations, you can now search for mods
on artists related to some given artist.

Tied votes are now passed (previously there had to be a clear majority to
win).

When sending an e-mail to another moderator, sometimes extra quotes were
added to the subject line (so instead of the subject being Hi
there for example, it would be “Hi there”). These
stray quotes have now been removed.

The HTML generated by a “Link with Icon” (for an artist, album or track
link) now ensures that the icon will be on the same line as the text which
follows.

For “Edit Artist Alias”, “Edit Artist Sortname”, “Edit Track Number” and
“Merge Artist” moderations, if the record being changed is missing then close
the moderation with a “Failed prerequisite” status instead of “Internal
error”.

The “Show TRM” page now sorts the matched tracks by artist and album, and
only shows each album once (even if more than one track on that album
matches the TRM).Example.

Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Server Programmers

The MusicBrainz server now uses Mason
1.25 (previously we used 1.05). Mason underwent something of a
redesign following 1.05, so making it past this “hurdle” should help us in
the future.

Moderation Table Restructuring

The moderation-related tables have been reorganised, so as to speed up the
voting pages. Almost all queries against the moderation tables deal
with open moderations, but Postgres seemed to be having trouble optimising
those queries (despite an index on moderation.status). Well, maybe we
missed something obvious, maybe not. Anyway, what we’ve done is to
split the three tables (moderation, moderationnote and votes) into six
(moderation_open, moderation_note_open, vote_open;
and
moderation_closed, moderation_note_closed, vote_closed). So most
queries can now just refer to moderation_open, which is a MUCH smaller table
than moderation used to be.

As a side-effect, the data for closed moderations is now dumped into a
separate file (mbdump-closedmoderation.tar.bz2), making thembdump-moderation.tar.bz2 file much smaller. Hence, if you
want to download open moderation data but have no need for closed
moderations, life has just become a little easier for you.

Other Changes

The CreateTables-mysql.sql
script has been removed. It was generally poorly maintained, and
hardly ever tested, and the costs of maintaining it outweighed the
benefits. If you want to create a MusicBrainz database in MySQL,
start with the CreateTables.sql
script.

RDFDump.pl has been fixed. RDF dumps now contain all artists
we have in the database.